Our children, the next generation, have an uphill task ahead of them. They are graduating college and they are confronted by an economy that is not working in their favor. It is an economy designed for those who are already wealthy and getting wealthier and greedier, who then hand everything down to their children and grandchildren. For a young person from OlKalou to penetrate the cocoon that shelters the wealthy and their children is next to impossible. That is why we have to create our own reality which does not include spending our lives and energy beating on the doors of that cocoon, with nobody letting us in.
We grew up on huge chunks of land that we knew we will inherit from our Pioneer Parents someday. Even after we went to college and settled in our jobs in the City, at the back of our minds, we knew that if things did not work out in the city as we had hoped, we could always go back home and do farming. Our Pioneer Parents had huge acreage of farm they were not utilizing and I am sure they would have welcomed us back with open arms to do farming as a means to earn a living and raise our families just as they raised us on the farm. Now think about our children. They do not have that as a backup plan like we did. To put it in perspective, think about a Pioneer Parent who owned 50 acres of land. Very impressive indeed. The Pioneer Parent had 10 children and gifted each one of them some 5 acres as their inheritance. Not bad at all.
But now, one of their sons, a second generation Nyandaruan who is now in his 50s, has 5 unemployed college educated children of his own. He is still farming and raising livestock on these 5 acres of land because that is his only source of income, to feed his family of 7 that includes the 5 adult college educated children, who in an ideal situation should have been out on their own, gainfully employed. But since the situation is less than ideal and the children have been waiting for jobs for more than five years with none available, the father decides to subdivide his 5 acres of land, hoping the children can start farming and raise families of their own. Question is: how much land can each of them get? The math is very scary. Truth is, we are headed in the direction of Gikuyu where land has been subdivided so many times for every generation, to a point where everybody is now living on small plots (chieya). The less than one acre you give each of the children cannot sustain them and their families adequately. This removes the farming option our generation held as a safety net.
This is a crisis of our time which we must confront. We all know if we run away from our problems they will keep chasing us down whatever road we lead them to. The best way and only way is to stop and confront them head on, otherwise they will keep confronting us every way we turn, getting in our faces when we are least prepared, easily knocking us off our feet.
Like one Benjamin Franklin said, “Every problem is an opportunity in disguise”. What are our opportunities that are disguised as problems? That is what we all need to focus on together and try to identify solutions before we are swallowed up by the problems.
